CAC Brétigny

“Bascules”
Off-site season 2024—2025
Curators: The CAC Brétigny team (Zélia Bajaj, Milène Denécheau, Léana Doualot, Esther Gobin-Brassart, Elisa Klein, Danaé Leroy, Coraline Perrin, Marie Plagnol, Ekaterina Tsyrlina)

“Casino”
With Elise Courcol-Rozès and Fabienne Guilbert Burgoa

Galerie Francval in Arpajon
12.01—23.02.25

             “Casino” is an exhibition that brings together Elise Courcol-Rozès and Fabienne Guilbert Burgoa. We designed it as a playful space that encourages visitors to free themselves from the rules that normally limit their relationships with the artworks. We aim to place interaction at the heart of the exhibition by offering an experience, in the philosopher John Dewey’s sense of the word, as “an experiment, something we do, not something that happens to us[1]”. According to this definition, an experience consists of “establishing a connection between feeling something and engaging consecutively in an activity[2]”. In this exhibition, the sensations provoked by the textures, colours and shapes of the artworks encourage visitors to go beyond receptiveness in order to interact with their environment. The free-practice space designed by the artists offers everyone the opportunity to spend time creating by appropriating the materials made available to them, but also sharing resources.

             To experiment with a variety of relationships between the objects (the artworks), the subjects (the visitors) and the environment (the exhibition), the artists play with affordance, a concept theorised by the psychologist James J. Gibson before being borrowed by the design world. Derived from the English “to afford”, meaning both “to permit” and “to offer”, affordance refers to an object’s ability to evoke its possible uses. For example, a door handle can suggest in an intuitive way the act of opening a door, with its shape and context calling upon a repertoire of learnt gestures. Here, the design of the artworks is deliberately non-specific: they don’t have one single function meaning their uses can be constantly reinvented.

             Fabienne creates comfortable, modular and welcoming spaces. Her installations stimulate senses other than sight, often treated as the only way to perceive an exhibition space. In a living room with an unusual layout, elements wait to be handled. The only question is how. A rocking chair, the cover of which is removable, is elongated by long ornate points inspired by botas picudas (“pointy boots” in English). The artist appropriates a repertoire of familiar forms from Mexican popular culture. In hijacking dress codes, she reveals the sociocultural heritage of her works.

             Elise's installations are made up of elements with shapes and textures that encourage everyone to touch them. In the free-practice space, the artist offers the opportunity to create our own currency and activate a barter system. Elsewhere, items with different symbolic value can be moved along metal curves reminiscent of weighing scales. In this way, the structures take shape and evolve under the weight of the objects. The collective experiments proposed by the artist render tangible what the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “the social life of things[3]”. It's about experiencing the importance of exchange in our value systems.

             In this way, the artists hope to show that the uses of an object are tied to the environment in which it is perceived, which also influences the value it is attributed. With this in mind, the title of the exhibition is a reference to the gambling establishment, a place governed by transactions. “Casino” also means “little house” in Italian, which echoes the history of the Galerie Francval, inhabited today by artistic and collective experiments.

[1] Joëlle Zask’s preface in John Dewey, Démocratie et éducation, Malakoff, Armand Colin, 2022, p. 35. This text was first published by Macmillan Publishing in 1916 under the title Democracy and Education. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge University Press, 1986.

 

Elise Courcol-Rozès (born in 1992) lives and works in Marseille. She is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs de Paris, the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris, as well as the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Her installation, performance and publishing practice is informed by the observation of certain socio-political issues, as well as by research methods in the human sciences. Her work is often rooted in social structures (a prison, a psychiatric hospital, schools) as part of a co-creation approach. She has benefited from support programs and residencies such as Création en Cours (2017), Villa Belleville (2019), Artagon Marseille (2022), and she was awarded the Mécènes du Sud grant in 2022.

Fabienne Guilbert Burgoa (born in 1992), lives and works in Marseille. She graduated from the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy in 2017. Concerned about the museumification that is rigidifying oral cultures in the Southern Hemisphere, she began conducting collaborative anthropological research in order to create new narratives and common spaces that are welcoming and alive. She works on culture accessibility, and endeavors to build bridges between design and contemporary art through playful activation principles and intuitive affordances, as in MIMO, her first sculptural furniture collection. She has benefited from the support of the Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú (2016), the Museo Textil de Oaxaca (2017), the Collection Lambert (since 2022), and the Frac Sud (2023).